It’s been a month now since we started renovating the store, and the opening has been delayed a couple of weeks, but were oficially operating today. We originally planned a month to be spent for renovation, but hoped for less.

The marketing plan has reduced to social networks, the video campaign has been slightly delayed due to financial and time constraints, we decided that the limited resources we have are better spent on direct influencers to “The Store” instead of indirect ones, although I think that a large markeing campaign would do us good, we still need to get the hang of it before we expose ourselves to a larger customer-base. This decision was made to help preserve a certain image we hope to convey, and gaining experiance prior to such exposure would only benifit this objective.

We keep running into potential competitors, but after further research we notice their specialized base that we cannot compete with, we have the advantage of not being limited to any types of products.

So far we are ahead of schedule, but behind expectations, the plan was based on a worst case scenario and our expectaions were optimistic, so as a guess I’d say were doing ‘alright’, bearing in mind that we started from scratch.

When we first started planning “The Store” we went by the book, whatever we learned in college we applied. We started with a formal proposal and brainstorming sessions, we went with everything we learned but there was one problem, we were applying systematic processes to an unsystematic procedure.

The books certainly provided us with direction, but they limited our view, you can not learn to think outside the box if you’re thinking process is guided. Bit by bit we started identifying different opportunities that few people might have though of applying in a business manner.

Eventually a very well thought of plan and method was written in an organized manner, however, when it came to implementation, we had to improvise and slightly deviate from the original plan.

The major difference happened in the planed and actual marketing strategy, we had a marketing campaign regarding a mascot that was supposed to include a set of videos and photos to be spread via several common social networks, this plan was slightly delayed and, at this point, has a small chance of being completely abandoned, the decision has not been made yet.

The end result was about 90% close to the estimated outcome, with the major difference being in the marketing plan and estimated budget, eventually “The Store” ended up being what we expected it to be.

About two months ago I got with a friend from college and were talking about a business he wanted to start, basically he wanted to make a pawn shop here in Egypt, but it was clear that it would face ridiculous amounts of cultural and legal resistance.

The idea then developed to another similar business where the potential threats are far less and the investment minimal.

The whole idea was how to start a new business that could make it big with the least possible capital, both short-term and long-term.

“The Store” sells used items that are brought in by, basically, anyone that wants to get rid of their old stuff, we display the items and look for buyers.

The major threat that we are expecting to face is not properly exposing ourselves to our target market, since we are trying to minimize costs we have only a few alternatives to market ourselves.

We plan to market ourselves primarily by word of mouth and via internet social networks.

I will be updating you with the status of the store and any challenges we encounter, I will also post our decisions and solution regarding these situations.